BOOKS AND ARTS
16 August 2012, Review by Nicholas Sagovsky
You can’t take it with you
How Much is Enough? The love of money, and the case for the good life
Robert Skidelsky and Edward SkidelskyAllen Lane, £20
Tablet bookshop price £18 Tel 01420 592974
John Maynard Keynes believed that by about now we would need to work no more than three hours a day and the rest of our lives would be given over to creative leisure. He was completely wrong – but why? In this not-so-secular “Tract for the Times”, Robert Skidelsky, Keynes’ biographer, and his son Edward Skidelsky, who lectures in philosophy at the University of Exeter, explore how in the West we got into the situation where the rich work longer hours than ever for obscene rewards, while there is barely enough work for the poor, who scrape by if they are lucky. They pitch in on the side of those who are asking what has gone wrong with “the crisis-prone Darwinian capitalism” of our day.
Capitalism, they say, is delivering “all we could ever have wanted, and more, except the consciousness of having enough”. To counteract the “Faustian bargain” on which this selective bonanza is based, we have to go back to first principles and ask, “What is wealth for?” (not the sort of question you are likely to encounter when doing your MBA). Wealth, they argue, is not an end in itself, “though – disastrously – we have made it one”. Economics has slipped its moorings and drifted away from its roots in political economy, which was once about creating opportunities to lead “the good life”.
Taking their cue from John Rawls, who wrote about our need for “primary goods”, they sketch the elements of the good life: health, security, respect, “personality”, harmony with nature, friendship and leisure. None of these “basic goods” can be provided by the state, but the state can provide for the conditions in which they flourish. The state can help us restrain our insatiable wants, leaving us free to revisit the wisdom that teaches us to be satisfied with “enough”. A prime source of such wisdom is Catholic Social Teaching,
but there are other streams to draw on, from both East and West.
The diagnosis is powerful. I read this book in the week we learnt that the basic salary of the chief executive of G4S is £830,000 a year, while the firm had been hiring Olympic security workers on temporary contracts at £8.50 an hour. No sense here of the workers being valued for their contribution to the “common good”, or that working for G4S could be their personal gateway to “the good life”, a step towards having “enough”. Then it was Bob Diamond and Barclays. So it goes on – setting off yet another wave of revulsion against contract capitalism.
And the cure? This is a work in progress and the book a discussion starter. The Skidelskys are not happy with the kind of liberalism that says ideas about “the good life” are so divergent, we cannot arbitrate between them. They don’t accept that it’s up to the state to maintain a benevolent neutrality, providing a framework of governance within which those who disagree about the good can rub along, making money together. We’ve been there, and we’ve seen the results when economic and social regulation fail. There has to be more of a sense of the common good than that.
Three steps along this path are suggested – each, it seems to me, in its own way problematic. A robust, guaranteed basic income would be a serious step in the right direction, provided it were related to some objective measure of need (something the book does not discuss). Reducing the pressure to consume would be another bold step, if it were done by an effective tax regime (but how on earth would that come about in today’s fiscal climate?). A serious reduction in advertising would be a massive social benefit, but how could that be achieved in a market-driven democracy?
On their last page, the Skidelskys ask whether the reorientation of the policy they call for would require the support of religion. Probably, they say. They doubt that a society entirely devoid of the religious impulse could stir itself to pursuit of the common good. I wonder whether such a society ever has or ever could exist. The point, though, is that for a society to have a sense of the common good, it must have within it the social resources to resist the fragmentation brought about by unbridled market forces.
Understandably, the Skidelskys turn their back on Plato’s regimented Republic, but they also underplay the prophetic power of Christian monasticism. They mention St Benedict only to remind us that his Rule was preceded by Constantine and imperial Christianity. Private property, they say, in the modern world is “an essential safeguard of personality”, and “personality” is one of the elements of the good life. This misses an important point. Alasdair MacIntyre saw very clearly that Benedict’s protest against private property and in favour of obedience as the key to “the good life” was counter-cultural then as it is now.
Ideas of “the good life” can only be sustained by communities, small and large, which pass them on within a shared tradition. For Benedict, the monastery was a “school of the Lord’s service”. He spoke of the ownership of personal property by monks as “vice” (vitium). We aren’t all monks and there is nothing wrong with private property but we can have “personality” without it. We need a variety of social institutions (monasteries, schools, colleges, business ventures and banks) that are in various ways “schools of the common good” – something the market of itself is never going to produce, and perhaps a theme for the Skidelskys’ next book.
The diagnosis is powerful. I read this book in the week we learnt that the basic salary of the chief executive of G4S is £830,000 a year, while the firm had been hiring Olympic security workers on temporary contracts at £8.50 an hour. No sense here of the workers being valued for their contribution to the “common good”, or that working for G4S could be their personal gateway to “the good life”, a step towards having “enough”. Then it was Bob Diamond and Barclays. So it goes on – setting off yet another wave of revulsion against contract capitalism.
And the cure? This is a work in progress and the book a discussion starter. The Skidelskys are not happy with the kind of liberalism that says ideas about “the good life” are so divergent, we cannot arbitrate between them. They don’t accept that it’s up to the state to maintain a benevolent neutrality, providing a framework of governance within which those who disagree about the good can rub along, making money together. We’ve been there, and we’ve seen the results when economic and social regulation fail. There has to be more of a sense of the common good than that.
Three steps along this path are suggested – each, it seems to me, in its own way problematic. A robust, guaranteed basic income would be a serious step in the right direction, provided it were related to some objective measure of need (something the book does not discuss). Reducing the pressure to consume would be another bold step, if it were done by an effective tax regime (but how on earth would that come about in today’s fiscal climate?). A serious reduction in advertising would be a massive social benefit, but how could that be achieved in a market-driven democracy?
On their last page, the Skidelskys ask whether the reorientation of the policy they call for would require the support of religion. Probably, they say. They doubt that a society entirely devoid of the religious impulse could stir itself to pursuit of the common good. I wonder whether such a society ever has or ever could exist. The point, though, is that for a society to have a sense of the common good, it must have within it the social resources to resist the fragmentation brought about by unbridled market forces.
Understandably, the Skidelskys turn their back on Plato’s regimented Republic, but they also underplay the prophetic power of Christian monasticism. They mention St Benedict only to remind us that his Rule was preceded by Constantine and imperial Christianity. Private property, they say, in the modern world is “an essential safeguard of personality”, and “personality” is one of the elements of the good life. This misses an important point. Alasdair MacIntyre saw very clearly that Benedict’s protest against private property and in favour of obedience as the key to “the good life” was counter-cultural then as it is now.
Ideas of “the good life” can only be sustained by communities, small and large, which pass them on within a shared tradition. For Benedict, the monastery was a “school of the Lord’s service”. He spoke of the ownership of personal property by monks as “vice” (vitium). We aren’t all monks and there is nothing wrong with private property but we can have “personality” without it. We need a variety of social institutions (monasteries, schools, colleges, business ventures and banks) that are in various ways “schools of the common good” – something the market of itself is never going to produce, and perhaps a theme for the Skidelskys’ next book.
